Editorial: Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow

Up along the alpine ridges and in the hanging valleys, snowflakes once again come sifting out of the overcast, draping themselves like cloaks of ermine upon the evergreens. Drifts pile silently upon drifts, smoothing the jagged edges of this crumpled place we call home. Wind will sculpt those drifts into stunning cornices, layer them across exposed hillsides and pack them into the narrow basins where glaciers are born.

Winter is once again on the march through British Columbia. Officially, it arrived just last week, at precisely 3:12 a.m. Friday, although, if we’re honest about it, Jack Frost never really abandons our province. He has his summer hideouts, as high country hikers and mountain climbers well know when they venture into some shadowy cirque above the treeline where the snow lingers all summer in the thin air at the edge of a frozen tarn.

Along the coast at this time of year, clag and spindrift choke the inlets. Down here in Metro’s magic bubble — the envied Shangri-La of Canada — air warmed both by the exhalations of the city and by the temperate Pacific is drawn into the lower Fraser Valley, an invisible river of air flowing counter to the eternal movement seaward by our great watercourse from the Interior. The moisture in that air falls as rain, rain and more rain where it strikes the mountains. From Vancouver to Hope, almost half the days in a given year are rainy ones.

Drainage and damp basements, gutters and weeping tile, leaky building envelopes and clogged municipal storm grates, the hazards from halogen headlights reflecting off rain-slicked streets all seep into the cocktail party conversation, one of the eccentricities of life here on the Wet Coast. The winter ceremony of complaint ignores the magical fact that all that rain is actually life itself — it’s the world breathing — and the griping hides a secret gratitude that rain as it may, we don’t have to shovel it. For we know that up there in the clouds that hide the mountaintops, the rain is falling as snow.

For the rest of British Columbia, the province of buckled cordillera and boreal forest, for the rest of Canada, for that matter, winter means snow, almost 47 million square kilometres of snow. By late January, it will have accumulated to average depths ranging up to 500 centimetres in the snowbelts on Vancouver Island and in the Coast Range that provides some of the world’s best skiing.

When it comes to snow, B.C. is a province of extremes: most and least; heaviest and lightest; longest winter and shortest. Some parts of B.C. have permanent snow. Others — the south end of Vancouver Island, some Gulf Islands and Metro Vancouver — have the least in all the country by average depth, less than 30 cm. And yet, when it comes to record snowfalls, balmy Victoria, city of gardens, ranks fourth, less than five centimetres behind St. John’s, which received 68.4 centimetres one fine Atlantic spring day in 1999. If you want real urban snow, however, go to Saguenay, Que., where on average it falls 96 days a year and accumulates to 342 centimetres.

This sounds impressive until you discover that in 1999, Grouse Mountain accumulated 968 centimetres of snow. Now that’s snow! It makes even Whistler’s annual average of 411 centimetres look modest. Except that in B.C., even that’s not so astonishing.

Tahtsa Lake, just north of Tweedsmuir Park, averages 978 centimetres — it received 145 centimetres in one day! — and Mount Fidelity, in Glacier National Park, averages 1,471 centimetres annually. Those who are metrically challenged can think of the snowpack on Mount Fidelity as being higher than the six tallest players on the UBC Thunderbirds basketball team standing on one another’s shoulders.

Is anyone surprised that place names in B.C. referring to snow are exceeded only by those referring to rock? We have Snowdrift, Snowbank, Snowball, Snowslide, Snowpatch, Snowsquall, Snowsaddle, Snowtop, Snowwater, Snowman, Snow Dome, Snowcap, and on through another 31 variations. Even where “snow” isn’t part of the name, it’s often part of the history. According to the late Helen and G.P.V. Akrigg, who spent a lifetime documenting the origins of B.C.’s place names, Kitimat is a Coast Tsimshian word that means “people of the falling snow.” The folks there got their name when the arrival by canoe of far-flung visitors coming to a winter ceremony coincided with one of those monster snowfalls that coastal communities occasionally experience.

How important was snow to B.C.’s first peoples? Well, for them, snow was not a liability but an asset, a highway through otherwise impassable terrain, insulation against bitter cold, emergency shelter, a vast book upon which nature wrote its messages. Special terms for it in the many languages they spoke range from words for super fine snow that sifts into a log cabin through the chinks to snow that puffs out from under one’s feet like smoke. There are words for snow that forms tiny balls on your moccasins to snow that squeaks when you walk on it, telling you it’s packed densely enough to carve for shelter.

It’s no less important to us. The annual snowfall in B.C. is crucial to forestry, to salmon and trout, to agriculture, to countless municipal water supplies and to the province’s revenue stream from hydroelectricity. Snow is the annual deposit into a vast bank account of precipitation from which we make withdrawals during the hot, dry summers, particularly in the arid Interior rain shadows of our mountain ranges. As it melts, it replenishes lakes and hydro reservoirs, lowers the temperatures in rivers for migratory fish and irrigates crops. Consider that it requires 1,350 litres of water to produce a kilogram of wheat and 22,000 litres to grow one kilogram of beef. The astonishing economic importance of the winter snowpack becomes instantly evident for industry in the three western provinces, which grew more than 20 billion kilograms of wheat and 1.3 billion kilograms of beef in 2011.

So winter’s here again and it’s not like it was unexpected. Think of winter as an asset rather than an enemy. And remember, because the earth’s speed isn’t constant in its elliptical orbit around the sun, the seasons vary in length. Winter, it turns out, is the shortest season of the four. Relax. The rain will ease. The snow will melt away. Spring will arrive and the snowdrops will be up before you can say “Jack Frost.”

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